ould not possibly manage
the blinds and sashes of the lofty window in the octagonal room which
they adorn, it was impossible to make out to what period of the artist's
career they belong. Upon one of them--the 'Woman taken in Adultery'--we
got light enough thrown to show that its colouring is admirable. It can
hardly have been painted while Watteau was at work in Paris on his
endless reproductions of the then popular St.-Nicholas, but must
probably have been executed after his study of Rubens in the Luxembourg,
and his failure to win the first prize at Rome had opened to him his
true path to fame, and carried him into the French Academy of Fine Arts
as 'the painter of festivals and of gallantry.'

The fine old church of St.-Amand has fared better than the abbey. It has
been judiciously restored, and the third Napoleon made it an historical
monument. Despite the Radicalism of the place, we found it thronged
with people of both sexes--the men, indeed, almost in a
majority--attending a high mass. It was rather startling, as we emerged
from this service on our way back to Anzin, to come upon a large cabaret
which bore for its sign the words, in glaring gilt letters, 'Au Nouveau
Bethlehem, Estaminet Barbes.' Whether this is the conventicle of a sect
of believers in the revolutionary Barbes I could not learn. But it is
just possible that the Barbes, whom it celebrates, may be the
enterprising proprietor of the place, and that the sacred name he has
given it is a relic of that familiar use of holy things which never
scandalised the good people of the Middle Ages, particularly in Flanders
and in France. Does not the best old inn in the comfortable town of
Chalons-sur-Marne to this day bear the name of 'La Haute Mere de Dieu'?

I have already said that the miners of Anzin have been practically
enjoying all the advantages of co-operation, while the 'true
Republicans' of M. Doumer have been 'studying' and going to sleep over
that 'beautiful and generous idea.' As a matter of fact, the
'Co-operative Society of the Anzin Miners,' now known in commerce as
'Leon Lemaire et Cie of Anzin,' was founded, I find, even before the
Co-operative Association of the Glass-workers at St.-Gobain.

It was organised in 1865, two years before the passage of the Imperial
law affecting co-operation.

M. Casimir Perier, a son of the Minister of Louis Philippe, and the
father of the present Republican deputy of the same name, was then a
director of t